Rebel Music

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-98
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt

This chapter applies a wide lens to appreciate the multi-faceted popularity of Bob Marley in the late Cold War era. More precisely, the chapter explains how a commercial musician became a potent symbol for social justice and so bridged the worlds of politics and popular culture. In the mid-1970s, Island Records marketed Bob Marley to Western listeners as an exotic rock star. Yet, fans around the world soon embraced his critiques of inequality and state repression as well as his liberation anthems, notably "Get Up, Stand Up". By rejecting ideological binaries and emphasizing morality, Marley became an important reference for transnational left youth culture, activism, and militancy. Young West Indians, Africans, Europeans, North Americans, Pacific Islanders, and many others celebrated Marley as an authentic antiestablishment voice both articulating common experiences of oppression and offering a new countercultural aesthetic. In dispensing with conventional politics and articulating the dreams of the freedom fighter, Marley invigorated liberation discourse..

X ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Bravaglieri

Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 8000 militaries installations worldwide have been made available for civilian use. To many, the idea of attempting to conserve military sites from the Cold War sounds discordant due to the awkward or “uncomfortable” nature of the subject matter and the generally unappealing aesthetics associated. Even if the Cold War influenced many aspects of the popular culture, science and technology, architecture, landscape and people’s perception of the world, the legacy of this war is less tangible than others, and for this reason it is important to make an attempt to preserve its relics. Military sites might be the only representative Cold War remains of a country and reflect issues beyond their military functions. The aim of this contribution is to present few cases of reuse of Cold War military structures in Italy and to introduce the lack of their identification and preservation.


Author(s):  
Joseph Abramo

This chapter describes how educators may use Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to create instruction and curricula that challenge students to critically examine popular music. Through this process, students generate dominant, oppositional, and negotiated readings of songs, music videos, and other popular culture texts, and situate these readings within relations of power and privilege. This pedagogical process is illustrated in an analysis of contested notions of “female empowerment” in Beyoncé Knowles’s music video Run the World (Girls). Finally, limitations of the encoding/decoding model are accounted in order to create new aims for social justice in music education, including the exploration of diversity and the exploration of societal power and privilege in the production and reception of popular music.


2019 ◽  
pp. 99-130
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt

This chapter narrows the analytical scope to examine a transnational icon's audience in one nation. More precisely, it explores the convergence of mass media and social discontent in the early post-Cold War era by focusing on the popularity of American hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur in Sierra Leone. Shakur's worldview was more nihilistic than that of either Guevara or Marley, and his iconic resonance has not reached the level of these figures. Nonetheless, Shakur offered poignant critiques of contemporary inequalities and so came to embody post-Cold War disillusionment and social alienation, particularly for young male audiences. To demonstrate this point, this chapter looks closely at rebel combatants' attraction to Shakur during the Sierra Leone civil war, one of the most harrowing conflicts of the late twentieth century. Militant factions embraced Shakur as an inspirational figure representing those attributes combatants wished for: empowerment and the ability to overcome great odds. They used Shakur T-shirts as uniforms and incorporated his lyrics into their everyday rhetoric. As a result, Tupac references in Sierra Leone offer a window on how young people sought broader relevance for their experiences and searched for meaning through the iconography of global popular culture.


The master narrative of Cold War sports describes a two-sided surrogate war, measurable by falsely objective medal counts every four years at the Olympic Games. This approach is as inadequate for sports as it is for the Cold War. Rather than a bipolar, superpower conflict, the Cold War was a competition between the dueling globalization projects of capitalism and Communism composed of far-from-monolithic blocs. While a fragile, fearful peace took shape in the Northern Hemisphere, both sides waged proxy wars that killed tens of millions in the Global South. Alongside other forms of popular culture, sports were deployed to win the sympathies of the world’s citizens, many of them from nations that had emerged in the wake of European decolonization. Sport was the most conspicuous form of popular culture in the period. It offered millions around the world the opportunity to forge identities that both supported and undermined dominant ideologies—racial, gender, local, regional, national, and international. Sport crossed rather than created borders and identities—and it did so in myriad and intricate ways. This book brings together experts working on sports in the United States, USSR, German Democratic Republic, Asia, and the postcolonial world. Their work is theoretically aware and underpinned by extensive archival research. Taken together, they go beyond simple notions of bipolarity and present new insights that should invigorate the study of both international systems and of culture in the Cold War period.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.


Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. Warren

Through narratives and critical interrogations of classroom interactions, I sketch an argument for a co-constitutive relationship between qualitative research and pedagogy that imagines a more reflexive and socially just world. Through story, one comes to see an interplay between one's own experiences, one's own desires and one's community — I seek to focus that potential into an embodied pedagogy that highlights power and, as a result, holds all of us accountable for our own situated-ness in systems of power in ways that grant us potential places from which to enact change. Key in this discussion is a careful analytical point of view for seeing the world and a set of practices that work to imagine new ways of talking back.


Author(s):  
Mary Elise Sarotte

This book explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on the world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, the book describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. Chapters cover changes in the Summer and Autumn of 1989, including the stepping back of Americans and rise in East German's confidence; the restoration of the rights of the Four Powers, including the night of November 9 and the Portugalov Push; heroic aspirations in 1990, including the emerging controversy over reparations and NATO; security, political and economic solutions; the securing of building permits, including money and NATO reform; and the legacy of 1989 and 1990. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Kunal Debnath

High culture is a collection of ideologies, beliefs, thoughts, trends, practices and works-- intellectual or creative-- that is intended for refined, cultured and educated elite people. Low culture is the culture of the common people and the mass. Popular culture is something that is always, most importantly, related to everyday average people and their experiences of the world; it is urban, changing and consumeristic in nature. Folk culture is the culture of preindustrial (premarket, precommodity) communities.


Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 293
Author(s):  
Tania Intan

AbstrakSecara alamiah, manusia membutuhkan sarana untuk mengisi waktu luangnyasetelah bekerja keras. Satu media yang murah, mudah dijangkau, dan digemari oleh semuakalangan di seluruh dunia adalah cerita bergambar atau komik yang merupakan bagiandari budaya populer. Pada umumnya, karya paraliteratur-visual ini memang bersifat fiktifdan hanya merupakan peniruan dari kenyataan yang digambarkan secara berlebihan(grotesque). Namun demikian, di dalam komik, sering ditemukan nilai-nilai kehidupanyang bersifat universal dan abadi sehingga dianggap layak sebagai bahan kajian budaya.Naruto, salah satu manga Jepang, dan Astérix, bande dessinée dari Prancis, akan ditelitisebagai representasi dunia Timur dan Barat. Latar sebagai unsur struktural dalam karyakaryafiksi ini ternyata juga menunjukkan kesamaan mendasar, yaitu keberadaan desasebagai tempat hidup para tokohnya. Dalam tulisan ini, akan dibahas pemaknaan lainterhadap lingkungan rural tersebut, yang memiliki andil dalam pembentukan karakterpara tokoh dari kedua komik. Metode kajian komparasi budaya akan digunakan denganpenerapan teori-teori yang relevan. Penelitian singkat ini bertujuan untuk melengkapistudi mengenai komik yang belum banyak dilakukan di Indonesia.Kata kunci: Desa, komik, Naruto, Astérix, Komparasi BudayaAbstractNaturally, humans need a way to fill their spare time after working hard. Acheap, accessible and popular medium by all circles around the world is a picture or comicstory, which is part of popular culture. McCloud (1993:7) defines comics as drawings andembossed symbols in a particular order, aimed at providing information or achievingaesthetic responses from the reader. In general, this visual-paraliterature work isindeed fictitious and merely an imitation of grotesque reality. However, in the comics, itis often found that values of life that are universal and eternal so comics are consideredappropriate as a material of cultural studies. Naruto, one of the Japanese manga, andAstérix, the bande dessinée of France, are examined as a representation of the East andWest. The background as a structural element in these works of fiction also shows the basicsimilarity of the existence of the village as the place of life of the characters. According toKartohadikoesoemo (1984:16), the village is a legal entity, in which a ruling society livesits own government. In this paper, other meanings of the rural environment, which hascontributed in the character formation of the characters from both comics are discussed.The method of cultural comparative is used with the application of relevant theories. Thisbrief study aims to complete the study of comics which is still very limited in Indonesia.Keywords: Village, Comic, Naruto, Astérix, Cultural Comparison


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